I am not getting the performance I am expecting out of PC. I purchased Watch Dogs and Dragon Age: Inquisition and neither of them run smoothly. Upon further examination I realized that the activity level on my GPU ( Radeon HD 7970 Ghz) was only reaching 60%. Is this what would cause the issue, and if so how would I fix it?
Specific Problems with each game:
Watch Dogs: On lowest settings it only hits 50 fps, on ultra it hovers around 30
DAI: Hovers around 30 fps, about every 30 seconds or so it drops to 0 then jumps back up to 30
According to various benchmarking websites my GPU should be able to at least hit 45 fps on ultra on each game. I am running on the latest AMD drivers. CPU usage hovers between 30 - 50%. Any help with these various problems would be greatly appreciated.
Watch dogs is a notoriously badly optimised game on pc so getting that to run well is going to be difficult. Dragon age is a very resource heavy game, I would try dropping the settings to high and msaa to 2x or off and see how it runs and maybe try tessellation on medium. If you are still getting stuttering problems then make sure you disable origin in game overlay in the origin settings and any kind of osd from overclocking software as that is supposed to be causing issues. I've personally shelved the game until patches and new drivers are released to improve performance and fix bugs and issues.
Are you playing at least in 1080p? Cuz it's CPU bound if your playing at 1400x900 etc..Also check your CPU temps if it's too hot it might be throttling.
Also what else do you have running in your PC like in terms of PCI-E slots? ssd? sata cards? sound? Some motherboards will defalt to 8x speed if both PCI slot 2 and 4 are used. Or if you have something in slot 1 & 2 it could share the same same lane etc..